Why do Afghan children have to polish boots and sell ‘bolonis’?

They make a living on the dangerous streets of fortified Kabul, two of an estimated 60,000 working street kids in the capital.

10 years old, that’s how small they are.

Imagine ourselves at the same eye-level as Inam and Adilah, in the dusty alleys, swarmed by smelly drains, threatened by desperate crimes.

Like them, you often hear helicopters hovering so close overhead that the windows in your rented mud rooms rattle. You see the polished, bullet-proof cars of the corrupt Afghan ‘elite’, mostly men, dressed in suits and ties.

Adilah with her leek pancakes ( ‘bolonis’ ), waiting for customers

Some American friends smile when they hear that the pancakes, filled with delicious mashed potatoes or salted leek, are called ‘bolonis’ in Dari.

“Nowadays, I don’t often let Adilah sell ‘bolonis’ in the streets. What if she’s near a suicide bomb attack?” Adilah’s aunt said about the worsening security, despite 14 years of U.S. / NATO’s ambitions.

Adilah’s aunt frying the leek ‘bolonis’ in their rented single room

Adilah leaves her rented room to go out into the streets, carrying the ‘bolonis’ in a tray

Adilah walking past a gas canister shop

Adilah squats in front of a provision shop, hoping for her first customers for the day.

She makes about 5 Afghanis ( less than 10 U.S. cents ) for each ‘boloni’ she sells.

Adilah’s thoughts are ‘all over the place’ when she works in the streets of Kabul

A young passerby asks, “How much is it for a ‘boloni’?”

Adilah’s voice can hardly be heard.

She appears lost in her world of uncertainties.

Earlier, her aunt had served Zarghuna and I two sizzling ‘bolonis’.

We had eaten one of them, so Adilah had gestured to the other,

“Put that on the tray too. I can sell it.”

She whispered to the customer, “Ten Afghanis.”

That’s how the world economy works today.

Even war-weary, impoverished Afghans sympathize with her,

as the young man took out a typically crumpled 20-Afghani note,

handed it to Adilah,

and waved deferringly, as if in protest,

no, please, keep the ‘bolonis’….

The young Afghan man must have been contemplating

what he could do in the face of 60% unemployment.

He must have been thinking,

“Why is a small girl doing what we adults ought to be doing?”

Inam, standing in a newly-constructed shop space, with his blue plastic jerry-can

of boot-polishing tools and a pair of sandals for his customers to wear while he polishes their boots

“I don’t enjoy polishing boots but I have no choice,” replied Inam, describing his breadwinning role in a family of six persons. His father can’t support the family as he is one of Afghanistan’s 1.6 million drug addicts, and lives in another province. “We haven’t heard from our father for about 5 years.”

Inam, describing how some students in school are punished if they don’t do their homework,

“They stand like this for half an hour!”

Inam, along the street where he usually polishes boots. A few days ago, he had left his boot-polishing tools at a bakery while he played street soccer. “Someone stole my tools!” Inam understands why he has to work, but is determined to study hard too, so he can fulfil his dream of becoming a doctor.

What does Inam wake up to every day?

His mannerisms are beyond his 10 war-years,

with a spirit of acceptance

akin to ‘innocence’,

though he is far from naïve to be able to

evade the drug dealers,

thieves,

huge speeding cars with snarling armed guards

and angry, hungry Afghans looking for cash.

And hope.

“The drug business is violent,

as the addicts can’t do anything

except smoke under the bridges,” Inam tells the class,

which is a story about his own estranged father.

The least the American elite could do for Inam, their fellow human being,

is not to lie that their military strategy has been a ‘success’.

The elite need to know

that Inam, like billions of the awakening 99%,

understand what’s going on.

We understand the realities in our flesh and blood.

Inam was hoping to hear his name being called out in the enrollment of street kids into the Borderfree Street Kids School,

where he learns Dari and Math, and nonviolence, and gets a monthly assistance of rice and oil.

The mission of the Borderfree Afghan Street Kids School for 2015 is to ‘share learning skills with 100 Afghan street kids ( including Adilah and Inam ) on understanding language, nature, humanity, and life, and to be students and practitioners of nonviolence. ‘

About 92% of the required budget for the school is spent on providing the street kids and their families with a needed monthly gift of a sack of rice and a bottle of oil.

It costs $534 to put one street kid through the street kids school for one year.

7 Responses to Why do Afghan children have to polish boots and sell ‘bolonis’?

I lived in an orphanage in Kabul for 4 years and taught the children, 320 of them, over half girls. I lived apart from the westerners. I traveled to Herat, drove to Mazar i Sharif and to Jalalabad, and hiked up into Nuristan and visited a village up there. Since then I would never do those things again, nor would I walk on the side of the road. There are now over 1.5 million widows in Afghanistan. Widows without skills or even the ability to read. But most of them have children. I have watched as the next generation is taking the streets in protest more and more, and soon they will correct the problems in Afghanistan. We just have to get the American military to leave and to divert aide to civil society, to farmers, to factories and to wind and solar power. At one time Afghans grew their own cotton and made textiles which they exported, as well as food. I am worried about another round of brain drain where most educated people leave the country looking for work. The situation is not a whole lot better here in Bangladesh, poverty is so high and the 1% are taking all the money. Corruption is high in these poor countries because of neocolonialism and war and greed. I believe this system is breaking down, that is why the rich nations are holding on so strongly, in their last gasp of extreme capitalism. When it breaks down we better be ready to go for wind and solar, and small businesses everywhere. And most importantly, equality for every girl and every tribe.

As the US prepares to reconquer China, having found a better platform to operate from than Afghanistan, everyone must wonder, “Where can I do the most good to bring this rent-an-emperor to its senses?”
In the US we have “rent-a-cops” who dress like police officers, carry guns and handcuffs, but are employees of private corprations. They call themselves “security officers”.
The US is a “rent-an-emperor” and at the moment it is being rented by Israel. So it says, to anybody who listens, “It’s not my fault, I’m just doing my job.”
Who can count a street urchin when the smallest unit of currency is a million deaths, a megaton bomb, a billion dollars?